An appeal to demolish a
Coventry house and erect a memorial to a woman who was stabbed to
death there has been rejected.
More than 600 people living in
Stoke Aldermoor signed a petition calling for the house of horrors in
The Moorfield to be bulldozed.
This week is the first
anniversary of Anna Hanley’s death at the hands of her friend
Deborah McLaughlin.
The pair had a row during
which Anna, aged 25, was stabbed more than 40 times by McLaughlin.
She was also hit on the head
with a hammer and had a plastic bag tied over her head in the frenzied
attack.
McLaughlin, who suffers from a
personality disorder, left Anna’s body in the downstairs bathroom
for two days and got her six-year-old son to help her remove the
blood-soaked carpet.
Police eventually found out
about her death when McLaughlin’s boyfriend told them what had been
going on.
She admitted manslaughter on
the grounds of diminished responsibility in November last year and was
given a life sentence.
Friends and neighbours of Miss
Hanley’s family have led a campaign to have the house where she died
bulldozed.
A meeting of Coventry City
Council’s Housing Policy team heard that Anna’s mother Margaret
cannot bear to see the house, but lives just doors away.
Presenting the petition on
behalf of the residents, Cllr John McNicholas (Labour, Lower Stoke),
told the meeting that the residents knew it would be difficult to
persuade the council to do such a thing.
But he called on them to deal
with any new tenants sympathetically and make it clear that they knew
what had happened there.
Council officers said it would
cost £28,000 to demolish the house, which was in good condition, and
that there was a high demand for family houses in that area.
Cllr Peter Lacy, chair of the
policy team, said:
“We do need the property
and the property does need to be occupied. It will be occupied by a
family who will deserve it.”
But resident Christine Eddy
said only desperate or unpleasant people would ever agree to live in
the house when they heard what had happened there.
She said:
“There’s a lot of good
people on the Stoke Aldermoor estate. It’s a very close-knit
community and peoples feeling’s are very high about this.”
“It always comes down to
money with the council.”
